Those interested in a Serial Series will surely enjoy this episode of NPR’s On the Media, which came out just days after the The First/Last Newspaper concluded—one of those “in the air” kind of moments.

The episode begins by quoting a historian from 1685 who worries there are simply too many books (an anxiety others have expressed in later years, and on which I’ve ruminated as well). It continues by looking at some emerging models for publishing that challenge the way that books are typically selected, marketed, and produced. (Last week’s announcement of the iPad prompted John Gruber to point to this useful summary of collapsing supply chains in publishing as well.)

Host Brooke Gladstone then interviews author Neil Gaiman, Institute for the Future of the Book founder Bob Stein, and professor Ann Kirschner, who each, in different ways, seem to deal with Charles Dickens and his publishing legacy. Gaiman begins by recounting Dickens’s struggles with piracy in the U.S. and his attempt to profit off the colonies by providing himself in lieu of his books. His American tours from 1842 and 1868 are evidence of the experience economy in action. Stein debates the idea of authoring as a private practice, and instead describes reading and writing as public activies that are shared by many, not owned by one. He observes, as a way of underscoring the nascency of our current media environment, that the idea of page numbers did not develop until 50 years after the printing press had been invented.

Finally, Kirschner explains an experiment she undertook to read Dickens’s Little Dorrit four ways: in paperback, on a Kindle, as an audiobook, and with her iPhone. Her preferred method is the latter (“My iPhone is always with me,” she says), but each is its own distinct experince. The paperback offers an encounter with her earlier self through notes and marginalia, while the audiobook prompts a reverie about Dickens’s own performances at his readings. She concludes—as long as there were a way to make a buck from each format—that Dickens would’ve embraced them all. I’m inclined to agree.

Seth Godin channeling Lewis Hyde at Cool Hunting on behalf of his new book, Linchpin:

What’s a gift? If I see a Chuck Close painting in a museum, I didn’t pay for that painting, I just get the benefit of seeing it. If I see a Karl Lagerfeld outfit walking down the street, it didn’t cost me anything to see it. If someone takes the time to use a beautiful Bodoni typeface kerned properly, it doesn’t necessarily communicate the words more clearly, but there was a gift element associated with it. We need to start with this idea that there isn’t just a transaction every time—I do something, I get money, we move on—that what gifts do is they create a connection, because they’re not even. Someone gave me something, I couldn’t give them anything in return. We’re not even-steven.

Also worth noting is Godin’s innovative PR model:

We started by offering a review copy to the first three thousand people who gave a donation to the Acumen Fund, which is a charity I support. And it didn’t take very long to have more than 2,000 people do that. We raised $100,00 in about a day and a half, exceeding our goal. So those books went out yesterday. We also sent 250 people who live internationally a shorter digital version (about a fifth of the book) so that they wouldn’t have to wait for shipping. It’s already showing up on Twitter. It’s already being reviewed. Some people don’t like it, some people like it a lot. What will end up happening, my prediction is, that between 500 and 1,000 reviews of one sort or another will get posted online, which will certainly reach far more people than a review in The New York Times ever could. My principle goal is to leverage personal interactions so that this book reaches the people it needs to reach, the people who are open to hearing what it has to say.

Above: Harsh Patel’s “Comedians & Musicians” and “Kim Deal.” (Click to enlarge.)

A gift is something you can’t get by your own efforts; it must be given to you. That’s how I came to receive a paint-stained package of little books by a young Los Angeles-based artist named Harsh Patel. Enclosed were a dozen or so handmade, photocopied booklets with titles like “Lee Mavers,” “Kim Deal,” “Cascando” and “Echo’s Bones.” The first two titles are the names of musicians. The latter two are titles of poems by Samuel Beckett. Each falls squarely within the fanzine genre, which Wikipedia describes as a “nonprofessional and nonoffical publication produced by fans of a particular cultural phenomenon (such as a literary or musical genre) for the pleasure of others who share their interest.” And yet something more than the adulation of an admirer was motivating these zines. Their vision was cohesive, bracing, and fresh.

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Above, from top: Franklin the pirate (from The First/Last Newspaper); the cover of Poor Richard’s Almanac by Richard Saunders; Dickens gives a public reading during his second visit to America in 1867; Twain the young author and journalist.

One of America’s first pirates was a Philadelphia printer named Benjamin Franklin, who was born in Boston three years before England’s passage of copyright protection with the Statute of Anne in 1709. At 15, Franklin watched his brother James establish the colonies’ first independent newspaper, The New-England Courant. Franklin ran away two years later and soon found himself in London as an apprentice typesetter. By 1726, he had returned to America and found employment in Thomas Denham’s print shop.

For Franklin, piracy was a win-win: money for him, along with revolutionary ideas for a young republic. The scarcity of books in the colonies led Franklin to establish a book-sharing conversation group known as the Junto (or Leather Apron Club), and, later, the Library Company of Philadelphia in 1731. According to the US State Department’s Outline of American Literature, which is available as a free PDF from America.gov, “The unauthorized printing of foreign books was originally seen as a service to the colonies as well as a source of profit for printers like Franklin, who reprinted the works of the classics and great European books to educate the American public.”

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Above, from top: Karl Marx; hand-loom weavers; a coin with Queen Anne’s likeness, 1708.

British literary historian N.N. Feltes has said that “Readers are made by what makes the book.” Meaning, the system that produces a text also produces the readers who read it. In Charles Dickens’s case, that system was serial publication. But, in Dickens’s case, that system was also the nascent industrial revolution, which involved the shift from what Feltes describes as the “petty-commodity production of books,” in which books were produced in small quantities by artisans, to the “capitalist production of texts,” in which books were produced in mass quantities by professional printers and publishers. In a very short time, the system that produced a book went from something like that which produced a homespun quilt to something like that which produced bolts of industrially-woven fabric. While the machines made the fabric cheaper and easier to make, its weavers owned nothing but their labor in making it. And while presses made books cheaper and easier to make, their authors in turn owned nothing but their power to conceive them.

The comparison of writing to weaving is not lost on Feltes, who uses it to recall Marx: “While the condition of early 19th century writers could never decline to that of their wretched contemporaries, the hand-loom weavers, nevertheless Marx’s comment on the weavers’ predicament in the face of the new relations of industrial production is illuminating.” Marx noticed that workers in a capitalist system are estranged from the work they make. Since their work is no longer their own, the concept of labor arrives to take its place. This yields, as Marx says, “the conditions of labor and the product of labor.” The book, which was once the work, is now the product; its text, which was also once the book, is now the labor. Its author’s right is not to the product but to his or her individual labor. In one stroke, the “professional author,” and the “commodity text” were born, along with the mass-consuming public to support them.

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Above, from top (click each to enlarge): The first page of A Tale of Two Cities, from Stanford’s Discovering Dickens; a modern CAPTCHA; international ads placed as part of a Google Books settlement; an ad for Locock’s Female Pills that appeared in a Dickens serial.

In 2002 Stanford University launched a “community reading project” called Discovering Dickens, making Dickens’s novel Great Expectations available in its original part-issue format and asking Stanford alumni and other members of the Stanford community to read along, exactly as Victorians first did, with the serial version that appeared from December 1860 to August 1861. In 2004, as Discovering Dickens readers were enjoying A Tale of Two Cities, Stanford joined the newly-formed Google Print Library Project, along with the University of Michigan, Harvard, Oxford, and the New York Public Library. A year later, the program would become know as the Google Books Partner Program, or, more simply, Google Books.

At the launch of Google Books, Google’s intent was to scan and make available 15 million books within ten years. By 2008, just four years into the project, 7 million books had already been scanned. When books are scanned, words are automatically converted by Google’s Optical Character Recognition software into searchable text. Occasionally, there is a problem with this conversion process, and Google’s OCR software either can’t recognize some text or it isn’t confident about its conversion, having checked the results against standard grammar rules. The only way to convert these wayward words and phrases is to introduce human eyes into the system. This September, Google did just that with the purchase of reCAPTCHA.

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Brian Sholis reviews journalist Timothy Egan’s book The Big Burn, about a massive three-million-acre forest fire that raged in August 1910, challenging Teddy Roosevelt’s newly-created Forestry Service. Sholis writes,

Political obstacles left the rangers poorly paid and underequipped, and they were no match for conditions in the summer of 1910. Extremely dry weather, regular lightning storms, and the sparks thrown off by trains rushing along newly constructed tracks ignited thousands of little blazes. On the evening of August 20, a strong wind called a palouser descended from the mountains and unified the smoldering patches into a firestorm of hurricane force: “What had been nearly three thousand small fires throughout a three-state region of the northern Rockies had grown to a single large burn.”

Amazon’s book listing includes photos and an author interview; Michael Williams of A Continuous Lean just posted some classic shots of the Forestry Service as well.

The original self-help book was by a Scot named Samuel Smiles and was called—what else?—Self-Help. Predictably, it was a massive hit:

[Self-Help] sold 20,000 copies within one year of its publication. By the time of Smiles’ death in 1904 it had sold over a quarter of a million. [The book] “elevated [Smiles] to celebrity status: almost overnight, he became a leading pundit and much-consulted guru.”

Self-Help was published 150 years ago this year. Thanks to the good ol’ public domain, you can read the bestseller in its entirety on Project Gutenberg, but Naomi Alderman, writing for London’s School of Life, pretty much sums it up:

For the modern reader, Self-Help is frankly pretty dull. […] There’s no real line of argument. Instead it’s a compendium of hundreds of stories, all on the same pattern:

1) A young man (and they are almost all men) grows up poor or disadvantaged;
2) He conceives an ambition but is repeatedly thwarted;
3) Nonetheless, he perseveres, and works extremely hard;
4) Finally, success! Self-Help certainly isn’t part of our modern ‘quick-fix’ culture.

Phase 3 of this process often lasts for decades.

The endlessly brilliant Umberto Eco on infiniteness, order, and lists:

We have always been fascinated by infinite space, by the endless stars and by galaxies upon galaxies. How does a person feel when looking at the sky? He thinks that he doesn’t have enough tongues to describe what he sees. Nevertheless, people have never stopping describing the sky, simply listing what they see. Lovers are in the same position. They experience a deficiency of language, a lack of words to express their feelings. But do lovers ever stop trying to do so? They create lists: Your eyes are so beautiful, and so is your mouth, and your collarbone… One could go into great detail.

Oh and there’s a whole book? Wishlisted! (via Bobulate)

Above, top: Internet Archive Headquarters, San Francisco. Above, bottom: Internet Archive Mirror Services, Bibliotheca Alexandria.

BY ROB GIAMPIETRO & DAVID REINFURT

0 — To begin let me ask straight out: are there any off-limit areas?

1 — I certainly can’t think of any, apart from the music, of course.

0 — I’ve recently been thinking about libraries, and I know this is a conversation we’ve shared off and on for a while. Perhaps I’ll pick it back up, now.

The first libraries were based on an Archive model, a safe place for important records. They housed mostly commercial transactions and inventories recorded on clay tablets. As the library developed, it retained this archival function, but on July 1, 1731, Benjamin Franklin and the Leather Apron Club of Philadelphia established the first public Circulating Library. Books were quite expensive at the time and by pooling resources, many volumes could be shared among contributing members. One was free to borrow any book for a length of time, return it, and borrow another. This new Library was built to expand and evolve, a shifting arrangement of ideas and objects constantly circulating in a concentrated community of committed readers.

In recent years yet another library model has materialized, specifically online, which might be called the Distributing Library. The Internet Archive or Project Gutenberg are perhaps examples, where a large collection of documents are collected together electronically and made available free for download. Instead of 50,000 books, one copy each, sealed in an Archive; or 15,000 books, a few copies each, all constantly circulating; the Distributing Library offers any number of “books,” with unlimited copies, all available free to be downloaded, digested, dispersed. Now, if the Archive Model essentially treats books as Capital, investing them back into the institution in order to reinforce and expand the reach of the library and the Circulating Library constitutes a gift economy by freely sharing the books in its collection through a network of benign strangers, then, what economic model corresponds to the Distributing Library?

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